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Fixing schools will take huge effort

Nick Taylor. Opinion piece for Business Day. August 2006.

If anyone outside of the education community still harboured any doubts about the crisis in our schools, these should have been abruptly dispelled by the missive from the education department published in the national press at the weekend. In An Open Letter to all Primary School rincipals, the department states: “Since the introduction of the National Curriculum Statement, many teachers believe they do not have to teach reading any more. Nothing could be further from the truth. Reading is probably the single most important skill a child needs and it should be acquired as early as possible.” There is no mistaking the main message of the department’s letter: despite revising the curriculum statements in 2000, teachers are still not clear on what they are supposed to teach. Part of the problem is that outcomes-based education (OBE) slogans still obfuscate, and OBE practices still distract teachers from the main business of teaching reading, writing and calculating.
 
Thus, a survey by the Human Sciences Research Council last year found that teachers spend, on average, only 3,2 hours a week teaching, with many hours spent on activities such as “continuous assessment”, a laborious and complex process requiring reams of paperwork and involving, among others, pupils assessing themselves and each other in pairs and in groups.
 
The mind boggles at the prospect of children who can’t read assessing the work of their peers and themselves! The emperor truly has no clothes.
 
An analysis of the results of the annual senior certificate examination reveals that close to 80% of SA’s schools are essentially dysfunctional.
 
Performance of high schools in South Africa
 
Number of schools
Proportion of total
Proportion of higher grade maths passes
Top performing
414
7%
66%
Moderately performing
827
14%
19%
Poor performing
4877
79%
15%
Total
6118
 
 



 Three features of the table are worth noting:

 
  • 79% of the country’s high schools fall into the poorly performing category, producing only 15% of all higher grade passes in mathematics.
  • Two-thirds of higher grade maths passes are produced by a small minority (7%) of schools.
  • More than 600 African schools are classified as top or moderately performing. These schools are the country’s star performers, producing excellent results despite their disadvantaged history and the fact that they continue to serve poor to very poor communities.
 
Although there is no indicator comparable to the senior certificate examination at the primary level, all indications are that the performance of SA’s 23000 primary schools is distributed similarly to the pattern shown above. Hundreds of thousands of children leave our schools every year without the foundation skills needed to benefit from further education or to secure anything but the most menial jobs.
 
More disturbing is that dysfunctional schools are unable to socialise young people into the attitudes of mind required for citizenship in a modern democracy. Without these attributes, school leavers are easy prey to a life of crime, poverty, corruption and inefficiency.
 
If we can’t improve our school system, SA has little hope of achieving its noble social and economic goals.
 
However, the figures in the table also show the way forward. What enables poor schools that fall into the moderate and top performing categories to rise above their circumstances and provide opportunities for their pupils to gain the attitudes and skills required for productive citizenship? Research on schools over the past four or five years is providing answers to this question.
 
 
Top of the list is good time management by the principal. Sporadic attendance and lack of punctuality by teachers and pupils is a serious problem in 80% of our schools.
 
A second management level factor is instructional leadership. The effective use of time is enhanced when principals provide guidance to teachers in delivering the curriculum: this includes planning and monitoring coverage of the curriculum, using test results to improve performance, and the provision and deployment of textbooks and stationery.
 
A third factor hampering effective teaching and learning is poor teacher knowledge. In one study conducted in two rural districts, grade three teachers were asked to complete literacy and numeracy tests designed for grade six pupils. They achieved mean scores of 55% for literacy and 65% for numeracy.
 
Just as disturbing are the rudimentary practices which pass for reading in the classrooms of these teachers. Improving the very weak knowledge base of these teachers must be an urgent priority. Yet the majority of in-service training courses provided by the provinces, universities and nongovernmental organisations continue to focus on peripheral issues such as the principles of OBE and the processes of pupil-centred pedagogy.
 
The good news is that central government and the corporate sector have begun to adopt a new approach to school improvement, based on the findings listed above. Thus, the education department’s Dinaledi project is targeting 400 topto moderately performing high schools serving a majority of African pupils, and providing resources and incentives aimed at doubling the number of higher grade maths passes in five years.
 
 
Training for maths teachers in these schools will consist of 100 hours of subject knowledge and teachers will be tested at the end of the programme and receive a cash award if they demonstrate significant improvement.
 
A far more intractable problem is what to do with the poorly performing schools. Experience in other countries indicates that these “stuck” schools require a high level of external intervention and support: often the first thing to be done is to remove the principal, and strong mediation may be required to break situations of conflict between factions in the school. The problem is that only government has the authority to intervene here, but provincial and district officers, by and large, are incapable of doing this.
 
There are many reasons for the inability of the provincial bureaucracies to establish strong management systems and provide adequate monitoring and support functions to schools: poor traditions inherited from the past; instability caused by frequent restructuring; resistance to accountability measures by strong teacher unions; and relations of patronage which dominate provincial departments and ensure that merit and technical expertise are given low priority when appointing staff.
 
 
Here, too, central government is trying to act, as shown by the presidential communiqué which followed the cabinet lekgotla of July 30, in which several measures aimed at improving the management of schools and districts were revealed.
 
This is an important start. However, there is a very long way to go before these measures will show any results in the country’s estimated 23000 failing schools.
 
Efforts to increase production of intermediate and high-level skills has caused government and the private sector to target those schools which exhibit at least moderate levels of functionality. Focusing attention at this level would seem to present the most efficient way of addressing supply-side constraints to economic growth in the short term.
 
But, to give only passing attention to the poorest 80% of the system is an inefficient route to reducing social inequality. Strategies for improving stuck schools must be developed sooner rather than later. Apart from incontrovertible moral reasons, social pressure, in the form of rising levels of crime and the growing incidence of other forms of social unrest, make this unavoidable.